Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. 

Articles by this author

Oil sludge from one of the hundreds of waste pits that Chevron left in the Ecuadorean Amazon. (Photo: via Indian Country News) Views
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
How Corporate Tyranny Works
The persecution of the attorney Steven Donziger is a grim illustration of what happens when we confront the real centers of power, masked and unacknowledged by the divisive cant from the Trump White House or the sentimental drivel of the Democratic Party. Those, like Donziger, who name and fight...
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President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in Bedminster, New Jersey, on August 7, 2020 Views
Monday, August 10, 2020
America’s Death March
The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial...
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Lawrence Bell (right), moments after being released from East Jersey State Prison on Sunday, is greeted by his friend Ron Pierce [left], who was also incarcerated for three decades. Views
Monday, June 29, 2020
My Student Comes Home
When Lawrence Bell, an orphan living in an abandoned house in Camden, New Jersey, went to prison he was 14-years-old. Barely literate and weighing no more than 90 pounds, he had been pressured by three Camden police detectives into signing a confession for a murder and rape he insisted at his trial...
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"The entrenched racism in America has always meant that poor people of color are the first cast aside in society and disproportionately suffer from the most brutal forms of social control meted out by the police and the prison system," writes Hedges. "But there will not be, as Martin Luther King pointed out, racial justice until there is economic justice. And there will not be economic justice until we wrest power back from the hands of our corporate masters." (Cartoon: 'Blind Rage'/Mr. Fish) Views
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Don't Be Fooled. The Corporate Elites Are Gaslighting You Once Again
Police take the knee. NASCAR and the U.S. Marine Corps ban the display of the Confederate flag. Nancy Pelosi uses a kente scarf as a political prop. Joe Biden, one of the driving forces behind militarized police, the massive expansion of mass incarceration and the doubling and tripling of sentences...
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Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites. (Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images) Views
Tuesday, June 02, 2020
The Treason of the Ruling Class
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked...
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Is Biden the solution? No. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images) Views
Monday, March 09, 2020
If It's Biden vs. Trump, This Year's One-Choice Election Will Be for Oligarchy
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously...
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Open, nonviolent revolt against the oligarchic state is our only hope. (Photo: Mr. Fish) Views
Monday, March 02, 2020
Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The...
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Assange would face a politicized show trial in the United States if he were extradited to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic cables, documents and videos that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Monday, February 10, 2020
What Is Happening to Assange Will Happen to the Rest of Us
David Morales, the indicted owner of the Spanish private security firm Undercover Global, is being investigated by Spain’s high court for allegedly providing the CIA with audio and video recordings of the meetings WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had with his attorneys and other visitors when the...
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The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. (Photo: Mr. Fish / Truthdig) Views
Monday, February 03, 2020
America: Land of Make-Believe
If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale...
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When ruling elites are unable to protect the rights and needs of citizens, or no longer interested in doing so, they become disposable. Views
Monday, January 13, 2020
How Democracies Die
Leo Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So too with failed democracies. There is no one route to the dissolution of the open society, but the patterns are familiar, whether in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic or the collapse of the...
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